Evaluate Your Hobbies and Save

One step toward achieving a more simplified life is to examine your hobbies. If one of your major interests is something that requires expensive memberships, high-priced gadgets, or large amounts of time with little intrinsic return, then you may need to reevaluate how you spend both your money and your time. There is a saying that the best things in life are free. There may be some truth to that, and it could be, for many people, the key to living a simplified and prosperous life.

While many people may already be familiar with this concept, it is much harder to implement than preach because it requires thinking of and adapting to alternatives to things that you may have grown accustomed to doing in a certain way. Let’s take exercise, for example, and our hefty health club memberships.

The alternative to exercising at a gym is exercising at home or outdoors. The principle is simple enough, but why don’t more people do it?

One reason is that fitness machines make the work of exercise a lot easier than it is real life. People accustomed to jogging on a treadmill sometimes comment how much harder it is run on asphalt. The conveyer belt we run on in the gym gives us a little boost of speed that we don’t get when there’s nothing between us and the ground.

Another reason is that people feel like they’re not exercising alone when they exercise with others in a gym. Just being on the elliptical next someone makes people feel they are in a crowd even if they are exercising alone, isolated by the music blaring from their iPods.

Adapting to the alternatives to exercising in a gym requires more thought and effort. People who feel a little slow running on asphalt might try modifying their exercise program to develop their speed rather than giving up or going back to the gym. People who would like to exercise or run in the company of others can join a free outdoor running group, walking group, or yoga class.

Exercise and gym memberships are just one example, but people whose hobby it is to buy the latest techno-gadget, collect stamps, or download the latest novel to their reading device all have options and alternatives to excess spending. Perhaps a common theme to many of these alternatives is the power of collaborating with others.

The alternatives are out there, but it does take some time and effort to make them work.